This year more than 400 organizations participated in Jane's 6th survey. The title of the report shows how much development there is in the intranet landscape. We are moving from intranet to digital workplace.

And Jane has been documenting this trend for several years. I think this year is the first year I hear more people talk about the digital workplace than intranet. Of course this broadening of the scope of Jane's survey and report also brings along some difficulties (for Jane...). The digital workplace is a much bigger topic than intranet.

Fragmented digital workplace

The intranet was mostly about the traditional internal digital publishing platform with static content. The digital workplace collects all the online, internal content and applications a knowledge worker needs to get things done. The report shows only a small number of organizations has a central, uniform digital workplace. Most have a fragmented landscape, consisting of separate tools.

Still can't find anything

Search is still horrible. Hardly any organizations are happy with their intranet search. Leading organizations pay much more attention to improving search. Users are frequently polled to test search results, search patterns and data are analyzed, and functionality, like tagging, is added to improve search.

Concerns

Information security is a concern for many companies with respect to the digital workplace. As is the quality of information. Other concerns are the influence of the social platforms on the company's structure and culture, and multi-linguality.

Enterprise 2.0

More and more companies are rolling out internal social media. Usually this is set up next to the existing intranet and is integrated into it over time. On the other hand only 8 % is working on organization-wide deployment of internal social media. The data seems to show that bottom-up roll outs are stagnating. But still 50% of the respondents is investing in this area. As you would expect podcasting and social bookmarking are used the least internally. And ‘prediction markets’ (although they were popular some time ago) and ‘gamification’ (now very trending, for sure on the Web) are not mentioned at all.

Internal social media ROI

What most organizations get from internal social media is well known. Improved knowledge sharing, recognition and location of experts, etc. Cost reduction and faster market penetration is not mentioned a lot. As is improvement of and integration with business processes. The report does show that successful internal and external adoption of social media are related.

Intranet in the field

I really enjoyed the section in the report about 'intranet in the field'. Some organizations shared how they use their intranet to support employees in the field, working directly with customers. Those employees could connect to the internal company and ask questions, consult the internal procedures, etc. This topic relates to mobile intranet. I'll share the mobile trends in the next post.

So, do you recognize the above-mentioned trends? What do you think are the most important Digital Workplace trends? And, what are the biggest challenges for organizations with respect to their (future) intranet?

Popular posts

This tweet by Jonathan Phillips (@digitaljonathan) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box.
I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller?
Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets.

Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list:

-user requirements: users don't require large intranet -search/navigation: searching and navigating a small intranet is easier than in a large intranet -mobile: the content of the intranet is easier to take with you on mobile d…

There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study?Goals of the studyTo provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia;To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy;To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business;To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers;To analyse and propose possible poli…

I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them.This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson."They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship.I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as well, an…